Among the English party is impressionable Lieutenant Yolland (Chandler Williams), who falls in love with the Irish countryside, the Gaelic language (which he cannot speak) and the Irish people – in particular the spirited Maire (Susan Lynch), already planning to escape to America.

The love affair is played out in a magical scene that is not only the highlight of the play, but also one of the great love scenes in English-speaking drama.

She speaks virtually no English, he even less Gaelic – but they communicate their wild rhapsodic feeling for one another by repeating, with heart-bursting sincerity, a laundry list of Gaelic place names to express their inexpressible love.

It’s a dramatic moment – beautifully played by Williams and Lynch – that could stop “Romeo and Juliet” in its tracks.

It can’t, however, overcome the play’s ramshackle structure, and one of those terribly Irish, O’Casey-style endings that leaves you up in the air with a sense of loss, without knowing quite what has happened.

It’s a difficult play to produce, and this version by the Manhattan Theatre Club – staged by Tony-winning Irish director Garry Hynes with evocative designs by Francis O’Connor and superlative lighting by Davy Cunningham – is better than most in uncovering playwright Friel’s elusive inner poetry.

We also have some grand performances, best of all Buggy’s boisterous, near tragic Hugh.

Yet despite many beauties displayed, the play’s broken-backed problems are here left quite a distance from solution.